There was something familiar in the tropes, tricks, twists and gimmicks in 2014’s Korean thriller “A Hard Day.”

A cop, in trouble and dashing about trying to cover his tracks in a corruption scandal, running over a pedestrian in his mania, covering up those tracks by stashing that body here and there. The corpse is stuffed into a car trunk and eventually into coffin with another body — that of the cop’s mother, who just-died.

The moment other concerned parties enter the funeral home, not knowing where that extra body is, and the dead guy’s cell phone rings? I feel as if I’ve seen that in other films before 2014 as well.

Damned if “Hard Day” wasn’t remade for French Netflix back in 2022. “Restless” was the title of what I called an “inferior copy.”

And hell’s bells, here we are at the end of 2023, and damned if that intellectual property isn’t back, only this time in Japanese (with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

“Hard Days” has a few Japanese touches, such as death and funeral rituals, and the gangsters this time are yakuza, and not Korean or French.

I will say this for it. I see and review so many films that titles and plot points become a blur. But it took me a good 30 minutes before I lost any thoughts of “deja vu” and paused this one to look over the writing credits to confirm my suspicions. It starts well, even if it runs out of gas and into complications that beggar belief.

Nobi Nakanishi plays Detective Yuji Kudo, a man about to have all his chickens come home to roost, and just in time for the New Year.

His mother is dying in the hospital, his estranged wife (Ryôko Hirosue) is furious he hasn’t made it to the hospital. His boss and colleagues are freaked out that Internal Affairs is investigating the “mob ties” in their precinct. And then damned if he doesn’t run over a pedestrian (Hayato Isomura) and frantically have to shift gears in order to cover up that crime.

The body’s in the trunk. There’s a sobriety check point where the street cops aren’t going to let the detective pull rank and avoid getting the breathylizer, maybe even his trunk searched, as they smell blood in the water around the mob-connected Kudo.

He misses his mother’s dying breaths, and is distracting by a phone that won’t stop ringing as he’s talking with his not-quite-ex-wife, child, a nurse and a funeral home representative.

Kudo is dragged into a meeting with Yazaki, a lean-maybe-mean Internal Affairs investigator. And just when he thinks he’s in the clear, questions start popping up around a missing person who happens to be the corpse he’s been trying to dispose of, and the Yazaki (Gô Ayano of the yakuza thriller “A Family”) turns out to be on the payroll of some mob or other.

Maybe not the Senba gang. Not if their old boss (Akira Emoto, who’s been in Japanese films since the ’70s) can be believed.

The action beats still work, although gimmicks like a cop willing to crash his car into a police cruiser to cover up hit-and-run accident damage have lost their sting.

And the fights, punchouts and shootouts are entertaining if not exactly novel.

I like the look and milieu Japanese crime drama veteran Michihito Fujii resets this no-longer-gonzo thriller in. But the earlier films of his that I’ve seen (“A Family,” “Village”) suffer from similar set-up and pay-off problems. Even on films that aren’t a direct remake, there’s an over-familiarity to the tropes he’s trotting through and a reluctance to compensate for that with brisk pacing.

An added liability this time is that our filmmaker doesn’t know when to drop the mike.

I wasn’t nuts about the Korean version, and nobody who has remade “A Hard Day” since has been able to improve on this coincidence-packed, potentially-darkly-funny-but-not account of a dirty cop doing his damnedest to avoid the comeuppance he so ricnly deserves.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Nobi Nakanishi, Ryôko Hirosue, Gô Ayano, Hayato Isomura and Akira Emoto.

Credits: Directed by Michihito Fujii, scripted by Michihito Fujii and Kenya Hirata, based on the Korean film “A Hard Day,” scripted and directed by Seong Hun Kim. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58